Research funded by the National Eye Institute offers insight into what is happening in our brains when our working memory must use its limited resources to remember multiple things.
The study found that two parts of the brain work together to ensure that more brain resources are given to remember a priority item when a person is juggling more than one item in memory.
The study involved people remembering spatial locations. Imagine seeing two books on different shelves of a cluttered bookcase that was not arranged in any order. How could you remember where they were if you came back a few seconds later?
That’s the job of working memory, which temporarily stores information in your brain for a short period of time, while you process and decide what to do with it, said Hsin-Hung Li, Ph.D., lead author of the study and assistant professor of psychology at The Ohio State University.
In this study, published recently in the journal Science Advances, Li and his colleagues observed activity in the brain while people tried to remember the location of two items.
“Very often when you try to remember multiple things, one item might be more important than another,” Li said.
“What we found is that the more important item is represented in the brain more precisely, while the less important item is given much lower resolution.”
In the bookshelf example, you may remember exactly where on a specific shelf the more important book was located. But you may only know that the less vital book was somewhere in the upper left corner of the bookshelf.
The study involved participants whose brains were scanned in an fMRI machine while they looked at a screen. They were shown two dots, and their goal was to memorize their positions on the screen. Participants were told it was more important to remember the location of the dot that appeared in one area of the screen – this was the high-priority item.
The two dots appeared on the screen simultaneously for just a half-second. Twelve seconds later the participants were asked where one of the dots had appeared. Usually, they were asked where the high-priority dot had appeared. But about 30% of the time, they were asked to indicate where the low-priority dot had shown up.
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